Airtel services in West remain suspended

Airtel's mobile and data services in Mumbai, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh circles remained suspended for the second day due to an outage caused by a fire in the telco's Malad office on Tuesday.

The company tweeted on Wednesday morning to inform customers about a partial network outage caused by a fire at an office in Mumbai. Airtel said voice and text message services were restored and the company expects to restore 2G and 3G services within the day.

Corporate email, data and voice services continued to be down for many users in the morning hours, however services seemed to improve towards the evening. An Airtel customer from Mumbai said e-mails and voice services were functioning with a few exceptions of sluggishness experienced during the early hours of the day.

The outage does not seem to have attracted a lot of flak from irate customers since many corporate executives are taking their annual leaves over Christmas till the New Year. However, this outage may turn out to be longer than the one in 2008, when a fire in its Lower Parel office disrupted services for over 12 hours.

Bharti Airtel said in a statement, ""The facility that was impacted in yesterday's fire had some of our critical installations (such as roaming links, MPLS POPs, IPLC links, VSAT links and internet gateways) which are vital for running voice and data services. The situation required their reconstruction in alternate facilities as well as rerouting of traffic, which despite redundancies and expertise available, are time-consuming processes. Our teams have been working round the clock to restore these services, and we are happy to state that all mobile, DSL and mobile data services have largely normalized. However, some customers may be facing intermittent network congestion on some legs during the network stabilization process. We continue to work on our Enterprise Services delivery, which will start normalizing tomorrow."

The problem occurred due to short-circuit at Airtel's data centre in Mumbai suburb - Malad. It resulted in a shutdown of servers that route calls from telecom towers in the region.

The company's Western region includes Mumbai, Maharashtra, Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, and Gujarat service areas. The last two were unaffected, the person said. The region accounts for nearly 17% of Airtel's 174.69 million users as on Nov 30.